HDF Newsletter #79

October 4, 2004

To subscribe/unsubscribe to the hdfnews mailing list, please send your request to ncsalist@ncsa.uiuc.edu with the appropriate command (e.g. subscribe hdfnews, unsubscribe hdfnews, help) in the *body* of the message.

CONTENTS

Release of HDF5-1.6.3

• New Features and Changes
• Platforms Tested
• Known Problems
• Patch for Problem Unlinking Chunked Datasets

Release of HDF5-1.6.3

HDF5-1.6.3 is now available for download from the NCSA HDF5 home page at:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/

The HDF5 documentation is included in the source code and can also be accessed from:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/

This is a fully tested release. The configuration features supported in this release can be viewed at:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/SuppConfigFeats.html

The RELEASE.txt file in the source code contains detailed information
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/current/src/unpacked/release_docs/RELEASE.txt

For information on functions that have changed in HDF5-1.6.3, see:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/ADGuide/Changes.html

New Features and Changes

The major new features and changes in HDF5-1.6.3 are:

• Several improvements to the build, test, and installation for Windows.
• HDF5 can now include SZIP compression with and without SZIP's encoder, which is required for creating SZIP compressed files. The encoder is not required for reading SZIP compressed files. On our ftp server we provide all binaries with the SZIP encoder included, but we also provide a few without the encoder. Please refer to the following page for information on SZIP and SZIP licensing:
  http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/doc_resource/SZIP/

• A new API function, H5Fget_filesize, was added. It returns the actual file size of the opened file.

• A new API function, H5Fget_name, was added. It returns the name of the file by object (file, group, data set, named data type, attribute) ID.

• The h5repack utility has been added to the tools suite. It regenerates an HDF5 file from another HDF5 file, optionally applying HDF5 filters (compression) and/or chunking to the copied file. The filters options are read from the command line.

New options have been added to h5dump to:

• print dataset filters, storage layout, and fill value information
• print a list of the file contents
• escape non-printable characters
• print the contents of the boot block
• print array indices with the data (default)

• The following F90 subroutines have been added: h5fget_filesize_f, h5iget_file_id_f, h5premove_filter_f, and h5zget_filter_info_f.
• New C++ wrappers have been added for variable length datatypes, as well as for many other API functions.
• Support was added for several platforms and compilers:

• PGI Fortran for Linux64 (x86-64)
• Absoft F95 for Linux 2.4 -32 bit
• IBM XL Fortran and Absoft F95 for Mac OS X

This release also contains many bug fixes. Please refer to the RELEASE.txt file in the source code for a comprehensive list of new features and changes.

Platforms Tested

AIX 5.1 and 5.2 (32 and 64 bit) Cray T3E, SV1, T90 FreeBSD HP-UX IRIX64 (32 and 64 bit) Linux 2.4 Mac OS X OSF1 Solaris (32 and 64 bit) TFLOPS Windows

For further information please refer to the following page (or RELEASE.txt):

http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/platforms5.html

Known Problems

Known problems at release time are listed in the RELEASE.txt file that comes with the source code.

Further information on known problems can be found on the following page:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/known_problems5.html

Patch for Problem Unlinking Chunked Datasets

After testing began for HDF5-1.6.3, a problem was encountered with unlinking chunked datasets, which caused the library to crash. The fix for this problem did not make it into the HDF5-1.6.3 release. However, a patch is available for this problem, which can be downloaded from the patches directory at:ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/current/src/patches/

Either:

• Download the HDF5-1.6.3 source code AND download the H5Distore.c file from the patches directory, replacing the H5Distore.c file in the source code under ./hdf5-1.6.3/src/.

OR

• Download the patched HDF5-1.6.3 source code (hdf5-1.6.3-patch.tar.gz) from the patches directory.

Note that this fix is NOT included in the pre-compiled binaries we provide.